And if ganging up inserts still seems too slow, there's apparently a bulk load command named ".import" that will load a table from a file in one-shot:

• http://programmingfaq.w3ec.com/faq/54289/bulk-load-data-into-sqlite
• http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite.html

The fact that there's a ".seperator" command makes it sound like it's better suited to tsv files than csv, but you'd need to play around with it to see. Most database bulk-loaders seem to work with some version of csv, but frequently you'll need to massage the csv first to get it in the form they expect: csv is a standard without a standard.